The Month That Was August......2021

One of the quaint things I really enjoy about England is the advanced doorway etiquette we adopt. When two people meet at a doorway going in opposite directions, it triggers a burst of complex, silent and unfathomably intricate social calculations to try and determine who should step aside.

You would think people could just briefly discuss it, accept the terms of the conversation and move on with their day. But it is forbidden to go against the rules to strike up a conversation with a passer-by. An awkward silent approach must be adopted. 

If you get it wrong one way, you might end up touching a stranger or performing a doorway foxtrot rendition. If you get it wrong the other way, you end up standing there both awkwardly trying to avoid going through for what feels like eternity.

And this all pretty much sums up where we stand with the two most important political and economic individuals we have. BoJo spluttering through the doorway that we will spend and take on projects like never before all for the benefit of the north……it’s all about the north. With Rishi moving in an opposite direction with an empty purse, a load of debt and figures that don’t stack up. 

It's a pretty comprehensive list of political doorway jostling that the two are compiling, the latest being the State Pension (see below). Then add in Rishi being BoJo’s biggest threat to the throne……it is far from certain political times when clarity and unity is the one thing we absolutely need after 18 months of a pandemic.

It’s uncomfortable viewing……let’s hope it doesn’t make for uncomfortable living.       

 

The Numbers

It is not every month I get to comment on figures that show the economy grew by 4.8% in a single quarter and was more than 22% bigger than a year earlier. In fact, I can confidently predict that I will never do so again. 

The rest of the world is looking on with optimism, with the International Monetary Fund reporting that Britain's economy will grow faster than any major economy in Europe with 7% growth this year. This would be the strongest year for economic growth since comparable records began following World War II.

The pace of the recovery has stalled though. The “pingdemic” hit both consumer spending and staffing in the country’s dominant services sector (which accounts for 80% of GDP). Labour shortages, rising wages and higher costs also drove companies to raise their prices at the fastest pace in at least 25 years. Companies were left with no option but to reduce operations. 

Changes came in this month for furlough that will see employers asked to contribute 20% towards the salaries of those whose wages are being subsidised by the state. Official data showed 1.9 million people were still furloughed.

On the other hand……job vacancies have hit a record high as the UK's labour market continues to "rebound robustly", according to the latest official figures. The number of vacancies hit 953,000 according to the Office for National Statistics. 

With the unemployment rate falling to 4.7% and the annual growth in average pay up 7.4%, the labour and recruiting market will continue to be interesting!

The US economy is now bigger than before Covid in a huge consumer-led recovery, thanks mainly to a huge $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Recovery at a price! 

The Eurozone is officially out of recession after the economy grew by 2%. However, the Eurozone remains 3% down from its pre-pandemic level in late 2019.

Economists have reduced their forecasts for growth in China after weaker than expected figures due to new Covid-19 outbreaks and disruptive floods have slowed the momentum of economic recovery in the world’s second biggest economy. Growth has slowed to 6.4% per cent year-on-year, lower than the 7.8% expected. 

£7,000,000……the amount David Cameron made for lobbying his mates at Westminster on behalf of Greensill Capital before the finance company collapsed.

I read that 4,153,237 people got married last year. Not to cause any trouble... but shouldn't that be an even number? 

Trump of the Month

Despite it being holiday season for most, there has been no shortage of lunacy and foolishness for consideration this month. So much of it commendable and worthy of recognition.

 

 

Recognition #1: Dominic Raab

Dominic Raab lectured Nato allies on the threat of cyber-hacks to western Governments. In the same week, it was found that the Foreign Secretary’s personal mobile number has been online for decades. 

Presumably he went the whole way and had it listed in the phone-book for his minicab firm, “AAAAAA1111Raabvaark Cars.”

(That’s a joke for all the ‘old’ people who remember phone books. Thank you, old people. Thank you for reading to my joke.) 

Trump Lunacy Rating: 7.5 / 10

 

Recognition #2: Gavin Williamson

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson is to pour £4 million of taxpayer money to support learning Latin in state schools.   

Surely teaching basic first aid, home finance skills or anything other than Latin would be more useful?

Quite simply……Quid Stultus 

Trump Lunacy Rating: 8.5 / 10

 

Recognition #3: Grant Shapps

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps faced a backlash from ministers after the Government abandoned plans for a new international travel watchlist that would have given warning of amber countries going to red (meaning holidaymakers would have to quarantine in hotels for ten days on their return). 

Shapps failed to do the maths that putting Spain in red would mean more than 500,000 Brits having to quarantine in the 58,000 hotel rooms held on reserve.

I naively assumed that the travel traffic light system was based on the threat that arrivals brought to the UK. It now appears that it is simply whether we can accommodate the numbers arriving. What a mess. 

Trump Lunacy Rating: 9 / 10

 

Recognition #4: Duchess of Sussex

Megan launched her 40x40 campaign which involves her asking 40 friends to contribute 40 minutes of mentoring to support women re-entering the workforce. Watching the promotional video she announced her desire to help women “mobilising back into the workforce” after Covid. 

How did we even end up with a workplace mentor who famously doesn’t work? It’s bonkers that in 2021 when our world is filled with so many talented female politicians, scientists and academics, one of the most talked about and influential female figures is still someone who doesn’t have a proper job. What have we done to deserve that?

Trump Lunacy Rating: 8 / 10 

 

Recognition #5: Alok Sharma

He made 30 international trips by air in the last 7 months. This, ladies and gentlemen, is our Climate Minister who is currently responsible for:

- Leading the preparations for the global Climate Change Conference 2021. 

- Chairing the Climate Action Implementation Cabinet Committee to coordinate Government action towards net zero by 2050.

No further questions your honour. 

Trump Lunacy Rating: 9.5 / 10

 

Recognition #6: Sajid Javid

A “communications playbook” issued by the Government to local NHS Trusts says that new wings at hospitals should be described as “a new hospital” as it strives to meet a manifesto pledge. 

In the 2019 election campaign the Conservatives pledged to build 40 hospitals over a decade. Together with 8 existing schemes this would, the party said, be “the biggest hospital-building programme in a generation”.

This month the Health Secretary (Sajid Javid) described the Northern Centre for Cancer Care, the first of the 48 to open, as “a new hospital”. It’s not new……it is part of the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle. 

I guess we are all guilty of misleading a little. I mean, come on……who hasn’t described their new conservatory as a “new home” over the years.

Utter madness. 

Trump Lunacy Rating: 9 / 10

 

I’m sure you would agree all are deserving candidates but this month’s winner of Trump of the Month for services to lunacy is……Rishi Sunak. 

The ‘triple lock’ pledge was a BoJo chest thumping manifesto commitment to increase the State Pension each year by the highest of three figures — average earnings, inflation or 2.5%. Whilst it could have been viewed as a vote sweetener, there is real substance and importance to ensure that the State Pension keeps its purchasing power for those that really value it. Too many rely on it for basic living means for it to be anything other than significant.     

But here’s the problem……wages have bounced back sharply after the relaxation of lockdown restrictions, with total earnings poised to rise by around 8.8%. Raising the state pension in line with wages would cost the government an additional £8 billion and lead to the state pension rising to just over £10,000 next year.

Rishi has hinted that the triple lock could be broken to ensure "fairness for pensioners and taxpayers". There is no reason in law why the Chancellor cannot change the way earnings are judged in the triple lock system. 

This is a classic example of BoJo and Rishi at a political doorway going in opposite directions.

Regardless of whether action is taken on the triple-lock matters little……simply considering moving the goalposts is unforgiveable. 

It is total madness. Surely we have enough creative people at Westminster that could create the finances elsewhere to fund this? Surely?

Trump Lunacy Rating: 10 / 10 

 

And Finally……

“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care”.

Theodore Roosevelt

The Month That Was......July 2021

What a funny old month July was. There was plenty of ‘potential’ opportunities to celebrate a wonderful month……but it all fell a little short and disappointed.

We came so close in the football……but those street wise Italians just teased us into thinking it was coming home. To be honest though, I’m just not sure we should be entering these footie tournaments ….it just doesn’t bring out the best in people.

More players than not are simply cheating to win. And when that fails, they have a bloody good spit and a decent swear at the ref. Supporters can’t have a pre-match beer without putting firecrackers up their……(you know where I mean……you’ve seen the pictures), breaking into the stadium and beating each other up. If we can’t watch a teenage kid miss one shot without turning to racist abuse, then clearly we need the FA to do the one thing that can stop this awful chain of events……simply don’t enter in the first place. Nobody says we have to. There’s no law that forces us to take part in these competitions. Nobody is complaining that the Vatican City football team doesn’t enter and they have won the Euros as many times as England.

And don’t get me start on Formular One (or F1 for the nerds). A tiny gust of wind at turn four can determine the outcome of a grand prix. We were told the other day that Mercedes had failed to win because there had been a light shower an hour or so before the race began. I’m sorry but it can hardly be classified as a sport if the winner is determined by a weather event that happened before everyone set off. Hamilton won but nobody seemed to celebrate given that he caused a brutal crash on lap 1, presumably because his car wasn’t set up for the correct weather. It’s difficult to celebrate that to be fair.

Then there was this year’s Tour de France. Hilarious. It’s impossible to work out what’s going on. You have a leader who’s hurtling towards the line, and then all of a sudden, he gives up and everyone swarms past in a jumble of sinew and socialism until eventually they all crash into one another and fall off. Behind the endless accidents you now have tactics that mean it’s no longer a sport in which a group of men pedal as fast as possible over a very great distance to see which one is the best. Instead, you have mathematicians in dark rooms deciding who should be in the lead at any given moment, how fast they should be going, what isotonic drink they should be drinking and in what order they should ride when the wind blows from the East. Anyway, the British mathematician wasn’t quite as good as the UAE mathematician, so Team UAE won. Terrific.

Andy Murray offered hope of celebration in Wimbledon as the BBC informed us every 10 minutes. What is it with people dressed in white, wiping their hands on a towel every 20 seconds and then sitting down. I just don’t get it. These guys and girls are at the peak of physical fitness, but after serving one ball in 13C they somehow develop such sweaty palms that they must stroll to the back of the court and stand there for a few moments to wipe away the rivers of perspiration. Then, after several minutes of doing this, they amble to a comfy chair at the side of the court where they chew idly on 4 grams of protein bar. Then it’s back to the hand-wiping, and so on, until one of them falls over and the other is declared the winner. My goodness it’s dreary, especially when Team Murray is knocked out early doors by a random we’ve never heard of.

At least Judy Murray had much to celebrate……winning the WTA Mother award for nurturing tennis players. Seriously! I’ve never heard of this award. Wouldn’t she just win it every year? Who the hell won it in 2016? I’m certainly not celebrating this.

The sport of politics had cause to celebrate though. When Rishi and BoJo were ‘pinged’ to self-isolate, the Government set about establishing a random pilot study that BoJo and Rishi were chosen  randomly which allowed them to avoid self-isolation. Amazing……just how lucky was that! This had to be a personal best in setting up such an experimental study in such short time. World leading British science at its best.

Labour also achieved a personal best in getting Rishi and BoJo to U-turn in under 2 hours and isolate like the rest of the great unwashed. A quite remarkable performance by Labour.

Imagine living in a time when the leaders of this country have to be shamed into doing the right thing. Imagine that!

The Numbers

BoJo celebrated reaching 2 years as PM (whilst isolating in Chequers). Plenty of time to reflect on a tumultuous 2 years even by the standards of his rollercoaster life. A 2nd divorce, a 3rd marriage, the arrival of child 6 (with number 7 enroute), 3 national lockdowns and 57 coronavirus news conferences. That's after a Brexit war of attrition in his first year in which he shut down parliament illegally, kicked out 21 rebel Conservative MPs and won the Tories' biggest election victory since Thatcher with an "oven-ready" deal on Brexit that yielded an 80 seat majority. Even by BoJo’s standards, that is quite a set of numbers.

Elsewhere……

Furlough reached a new low with just 5% of workers on the scheme (1.3 million), considerably smaller than last summer’s peak of 33%.

The increase in the employment rate has increased consumer confidence, edging above pre-Covid levels for the first time. The GFK consumer confidence barometer (I know, I need to get out more) has delivered a main reading of -7 for July, up from -9 in June and a two-point improvement on the score in March 2020.

This has led to the UK’s economy growing at the fastest pace in 80 years and is expected to recover to pre-pandemic levels by the end of this year. The economy is now expected to grow by 7.6% this year (the fastest rate since 1941) and higher than the 6.8% predicted in April. It is the second consecutive upgrade to this year’s economic prospects and means that the UK is forecast to recover from the coronavirus crisis almost 3 years earlier than had been feared last summer.

The speed bump to be wary of is the number of people self-isolating and a rise in Covid-19 infection rates, which could create a slowdown in the UK’s economic recovery. As many as 1 million people a week were asked to self-isolate during July meaning that businesses are grappling with absent staff on top of raw material shortages and disruption to supply chains.

Nissan announced great news for the North East, with a major expansion of electric vehicle production at its car plant in Sunderland. A £1 billion investment will support 4,500 of jobs across the supply chain.

US recovery has also accelerated as the economy has grown by 6.4%. America’s recovery is accelerating at a rapid rate with Joe B saying that the world’s largest economy is “ready for take-off”, initiating what is widely forecast to be the US economy’s best year in almost 4 decades.

July also saw my biggest double-take moment in a long time. A reminder that we know even less about what’s going on than we thought. It came from the European Union settlement scheme, under which EU migrants can apply to remain in the UK permanently. During the Brexit negotiations, the plight of the 3 million EU citizens in the UK was front page news. When the deadline closed this month, 5.2 million of those 3 million had been granted the right to stay and another 500,000 were being processed.

That’s right. It turns out there are 2.7 million more non-Irish EU migrants in the UK than was thought during the referendum and 2.2 million more than the Office for National Statistics’ estimate last year. Measurement matters. Policy is guided by data. I’m still shaking my head at this one.

According to Greenpeace, 2 billion disposable plastic masks have ended up in our oceans since the pandemic began. 53 million masks are thrown away each day in the UK.

510 days of working from home……and counting.

Trump of the Month

I’m not messing about this month. Nobody came anywhere near close to BoJo’s level of lunacy and he is a very worthy winner of the Trump of the Month.

I didn’t think I would ever see a worse piece of political messaging than “Eat Out To Help Out”. But “Freedom Day” might have just topped it.

We have been advised by BoJo that “personal responsibility” is to be the maxim of the next phase of the coronavirus pandemic and that we must “exercise judgment”.

How, though? Take your guy in the supermarket with his mask on his chin. You know the one. Might have a medical exemption but probably doesn’t, on account of the way he looks like a weightlifter. At present he is definitely doing the wrong thing……BoJo confirms as much. But is he “exercising judgment” and based on what? 

Is the Government trusting him, say, to have pondered the latest study published in The Lancet on airborne transmission (Greenhalgh, Jimenez, Prather et al), while bearing in mind the inconclusive nature of the 2020 Danish DANMASK-19 study into the efficacy of masks at protecting the wearer, while also weighing up the latest, promising, if not yet peer-reviewed paper from Public Health England (PHE), “Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against hospital admission with the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant”? Is this what he should have done, before leaving the house and breathing all over the royal galas?

This is not a flippant question……it is a deadly serious one. Nor, by the way, is it an argument for continuing controls. Personally I have never minded masks, not least because they allow me to covertly mouth obscenities at people who annoy me, but the logic behind many Covid rules does indeed seem to be ebbing away as vaccines keep deaths low. Although the government isn’t quite saying that either, is it? Rather, it is saying that it is all now up to us. Without quite saying what is.

When we speak of personal responsibility in the age of Covid, we are actually talking about two very different things. The first is responsibility for ourselves, and the second is for everybody else.

For me and I’m sure many others, the greatest anxieties of Covid have been all about being the link between whoever I’ve just seen and whoever I’m about to, whether it’s small children or elderly relatives.

If the last 18 months or so have taught us anything it's that sense is far from common. It is practically a super power. This is the country that panicked and phoned the police when KFC ran out of chicken……and panic bought loo roll for a pandemic that was not bowel related.  

The amount of people not listening when the restrictions are there is crazy, yet we need to trust them to show common sense when restrictions are lifted. Now that is lunacy.

The Grand Reopening feels like an experiment. Freedom Day arrived and it was celebrated with a bonfire of Covid regulations. After 16 months, 130,000 deaths and several very long lockdowns…… BoJo’s great gamble begins.

BoJo’s announcement pretty much said……“I'm bored of this now……you lot figure it out" approach to pandemic. It lacks leadership. It lacks confidence. It’s madness.

Trump Lunacy Rating: 10 / 10

And Finally……

“You get what you settle for.”

Thelma and Louise